Proverbs 11:30

Soul-Winning

Pro 11:30

That is not the correct reading of the sacred text. The second part of the verse must be read in the light of the first part "The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life." The words ought to be read, as it were, by transposition of terms: "The wise man winneth souls." The usual interpretation, whilst not correct, does not exclude the interpretation that is accurate. It is supposed that a man is wise because he wins souls. That is not the teaching of the text. He wins souls because he is wise. Let us look at the matter in this way there is a necessity in wisdom that it shall win souls. Wisdom always wins. The wise man may never speak to a soul, and yet he may win it. This is not the picture of an ardent evangelist running to and fro in the earth upon the vague and general mission of winning souls, which is the popular misunderstanding of the verse. The real interpretation is that if a man is wise he will by the very necessity of wisdom win souls, draw them to him, excite their attention, compel their confidence, constrain their honour. There is a silent conquest; there is a preaching that never speaks, a most eloquent preaching which simply does the law, obeys the gospel, exemplifies the spirit of Christ, works that spirit out in all the details of life, so swiftly, patiently, sympathetically, completely, that souls are won, drawn, saying, Behold, what virtue is this? what pureness, what charity, what simplicity, what real goodness and beneficence! This must be the right doctrine because it comes out in the right line. So then the scope of the text is enlarged. He who would found upon these words an address to evangelists might deliver a very excellent speech, but he would miss the principal point of the text which he had chosen as his starting basis. The text makes all men preachers, by the necessity of their being wise. The sun never speaks, yet he draws all men who can walk out of the house. He does not come with a strong hand, smiting the door, or ringing the bell, and saying with sonorous voice, You must and shall come out. The sun simply shines, silvers the windows, seeks out all accessible corners, floods the house with glory, so that even cripples begin to feel they must sit outside, at least; they would gladly walk and leap and praise God in the open meadows, but being deprived of this high festival of thanksgiving they must seek a warm corner just outside, and thank God for the ministry of light. It is precisely so with the wise man. He does not know what good he is doing. He gives away his whole life, and yet is almost unconscious of doing so. Men look at him, estimate his influence, study his motives, observe with what wondrous precision the whole mechanism of his life works, and how all his thinking comes to solid and beneficent conclusions, and they say, So long as that man lives we cannot laugh at his faith: he is a living argument; he never speaks a word upon subjects of a metaphysical or even a religious kind, and yet his whole life is religious. He is like the concealed Christ; he is mistaken for the gardener, and yet the mistake is self-convicting, for they who affect to mistake him feel in their innermost souls that there is about him a royalty which common men cannot honestly claim. Thus we have only to be wise in order to win souls. The fool wins nobody; the buffoon is no preacher either by tongue or by example; but the solid character, the wise head, the discerning eye, the judgment that is well based, and that goes straight upward, heavenward, will in the long run secure attention, confidence, and honour.

The wise man does not drive souls he wins them. Souls cannot be driven. We may attempt to drive them, and therein show our folly, but it is of the nature of the soul that it may be charmed, lured by angel-like beauty, by heavenly eloquence, by mighty persuasion of reason. The soul that is driven offers no true worship; nay, as we have just said, the soul can defy the driver. The body can be driven to church, but not the soul. It does not follow because a man is sitting in church that he himself is there. A child forced to church is not at church. The house of God, therefore, should be filled with fascination, attraction, charm, so that little children should long to go to it, and it should be to them a deprivation not to go there. The wise man would not drive men to any form of goodness, though he is bound to prohibit them under penalty from certain forms of social evil, because those forms involve the health, the prosperity, and the best advantage of others. Men cannot be driven to observe the Sabbath. He who does not open his place of business because the law forbids him to do so, or society would frown upon him for doing so, opens every shutter of his window and every desk in his counting-house, and he is as busy there and as guilty as if he were there palpably, visibly, and defiantly.

Souls are to be won. The only way of gaining souls is by winning them. He that is wise in everything but soul-winning is not wise. There are those who are winning the world and losing themselves. A man cannot healthily affect the souls of others until his own soul is in the right mood, and in the right relation to God. There is a sense in which every man must preach himself that is to say, he can only preach according to the level of his own experience: he may say much beyond that, and aside from that, but in so saying it it is the tongue alone that is employed; the whole preacher is not there unless his experience be there, his entire heart, his deepest conviction, then how he talks, and burns, and reasons, and allures, and persuades! What is it to have won everything but souls everything but affection, confidence, trust, real honour of the heart? Such a man is dead whilst he lives: nobody cares for him; people will hear years hence without surprise that he is dead; his death created no blank, disturbed no equanimity, extorted no tears, arrested no festival. There is, therefore, a sense in which we should seek to prove our wisdom by the winning of souls. He who has won many souls is rich. The souls he has won will never forget him, never neglect him, will always put up the shielding hand, and offer the needful sympathy and help. Win the souls of your children; win the souls of all around you: give them to feel that you are a divinely-created centre, a high influence, a vitalising energy, a tree of life, and that your fruit is meant for the satisfaction of the world's hunger. The tree does not publish an announcement on paper or in ink that its fruit may be plucked; the tree simply grows the fruit, and when it has ripened, by its very ruddiness it says, I am ready; put out your hands, and satisfy yourselves with this food. It is the same with the wise character. All its experience is for the use of society; all its records are open documents, to be perused by those who would know the way of understanding and the secret of wisdom and the reality of noble life. Every true man is thus a living gospel.

Christianity is a direct appeal to the soul, to that inner spirit or organ or faculty for we need not stop to determine names which gives man manhood, spiritual accent, divine figure. Wherein Christianity is a religion of the body it is so secondarily; rather for the terms admit of amendment Christianity looks upon the whole man, and treats him in comparative degrees, never helping the body without its intention being to go further, and in helping the soul always including the body. But it is right to define the function of Christianity as a religion that appeals to the soul, wants to get at the mind, to find its way into the heart, to sit down upon the throne of love. Christianity does not come asking us to believe certain statements only; when Christianity offers statements for belief, it is that those statements being believed should be transformed into life, character, beneficence. You would not say that a man is honest in all his actions because he believes the pence-table. It is precisely what people are saying about the religion of Jesus Christ that a man is a Christian because he believes Christian dogmas, doctrines, or statements. You would not say that because a man believes the railway time-table therefore he often takes a journey. Yet this is precisely what men say regarding the truths of Christianity. They would describe a man as a thorough Christian because he believes a certain number of definite statements. He may intellectually believe every statement in the long enumeration, and yet know nothing about Christianity, as a man might believe the time-table and never take a journey. Christianity, therefore, wins the soul's homage not the assent of dry intellect, not the fascination of excited fancy, not the entrancement of a bewildered imagination, but the sacrifice of a life. It wants every man to say, Jesus Christ, Son of God, I am thine; take me, use me, keep me in thine hand, hide me in thine heart, and let me have no life but thine. Failing that, the rest is decoration, sentiment, utterance without eloquence, words without wisdom. So the position of the Church is defined. The Church does not claim to speak upon all subjects. Its supremacy is in one direction. A preacher might do very much good by discoursing upon the structure of the universe, by treating with information that is up to date questions which are troubling men's minds in all lines of thought; but the preacher's business is with souls, to get out of souls wrong thinking, prejudices, sophisms, follies, madnesses, of every name and mould and tone. Christ's business was to heal the mind, to work restoration in the soul, to glorify man by a resurrection from death in trespasses and in sins. Whatever is done of another kind must be done with distinct reference to this supreme purpose; then the initial work becomes sacred, of high value, almost indispensable in a complicated social system, but the end of all must be that the soul shall be won, have rest and peace, be a child of music, an angel of light, an ally of God.

Christianity thus becomes a persuasive appeal. "We beseech men," said Paul. Who beseeches men to take gold? Who beseeches men to double all their earthly possessions? Who beseeches men to seize an immediate advantage, and to insist upon its retention, when that advantage is of a physical and ponderable kind, which can be weighed and estimated and valued in plain figures? Yet, mystery of mysteries, every man has to be reasoned with when it comes to a question of the soul's relation to God. Why? Because of the vastness of the subject. We are not entitled always to say it is because of personal aversion to God, but because the subject itself is boundless as the firmament, yea, where the firmament ends this subject begins, making all things little by the sublimity of its vastness: whereas, other advantages are there, just at hand, immediately realisable; the appetites are pressing for satisfaction, and there is a fountain where they may drink and be filled; and the soul thirsts with a desire which drinks up all the fountains and rivers, and burns with unquenchable ardour, until it is led to the living God, and in eternity finds the reply to the necessities of time. Christianity occupies the position of a mendicant, an appellant, a suppliant one who goes up and down the world, saying, Believe me, receive me, give me heart room, and I will give you pardon and rest and hope. But the metaphysics are so profound, the advantages so spiritual, the competition is so tremendous, the world is so large because it is so near, the devil so mighty because so persistent, that sometimes the soul falters, hesitates, balances itself, withdraws, returns, and spends a life of peril, now almost in hell, now almost in heaven. There is no driving in Christianity. Therefore there should be no attempt to drive any Christian to church or to preaching; everything should be winsome, persuasive, attractive, alluring. This is the very genius of the gospel, because it is the very spirit of Christ.

This attempt to win souls, on the part of Christianity, is a philosophical attempt. Christianity is adapted to human constitution, mental and moral. He who invented Christianity, whoever he was, had laid a line upon the human mind, and had plumbed the depths of the human heart, and had noted all the outgoing and issue of human imagination. So much is this the case, and so truly and so really, as to resent the idea that Christianity had any builder or maker but God. Only he who made the human heart knows how to satisfy the human heart. That nothing can satisfy the human heart but the living God, in some form, is a proof that man was made in the image and likeness of God. Do not scorn the idolatry of heathen minds; do not pour contempt upon the superstitions of those who have never heard of the Son of God: rather ought they all to be accepted as points to begin at, as so many assumptions; yea, they may be regarded as so many solid bases on which to proceed, and sometimes the foundation has to be taken out after the building is up. Herein is a mystery, or would be but for what we know of practical life. We have seen one foundation taken away, and another put in its place. In the education of minds that have no Christian advantages you must begin where they can begin, and after long processes return to initial points, and work the miracles of Christ. The education of the world is the largest of all questions, and every element may be needed, and judgment should be suspended until the last element has been introduced and the top-stone has been put on. By this standard we would have our Christianity judged.

Christianity is philosophical in that it is also progressive. The education of the Christian never stops When a man says his Christian education is finished you may be perfectly sure it has never begun. Said Paul, "I count not myself to have apprehended." The horizon is always a million miles further on. When I reached the mountain I thought I should lay my hand upon the limit of the sky, and behold the mountain-top only helped me to see how much larger the sky was than I had ever imagined. So when we advance from one Christian stage to another it is to see that the horizon yet lies beyond. This should humble the soul in the very act of inspiring it. This, too, should make men modest in all acts of judgment; for we are not all upon a level, nor have we all attained the same points. There is no monotony in our Christian attitude in relation to God. The strong are far beyond us; we are little and faint, yet we are pursuing, and the voices of the great strong climbers come down the hill, saying, Struggle on; be not weary in well-doing; it is very difficult where you are now, but take hold of that projection, look at yonder point, halt a little to get your breath again, and then follow on; up here it burns with ineffable beauty, and every spot of land is a flower; we cannot see the mountain because of the Paradise. A soul is won when it repents. A soul is won when it says, "Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief." A soul is won when it says, "Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee."